In commercial printing there exists a typical workflow. The customer creates a document and submits it to a professional designer. The designer further develops the document into a more professional product suitable for commercial printing. Such products include business cards, flyers, brochures, booklets, etc. The designer then takes this file in electronic format to a print service provider (PSP). An agent at the PSP receives the electronic print job from the designer and begins to prepare a job ticket. Such a job ticket includes the detailed instructions to accompany the print job through the various stages of the printing process. The job ticket also is used to generate a cost estimate for the designer.
The PSP then must perform a number of prepress steps before the print job can be submitted for printing on the commercial printer. Performing these prepress steps takes much time and effort and thus costs the PSP money. Much of the prepress effort is necessitated by a lack of integration between the design and the printing processes. Often, the designer when creating the print job, does not know what printer will be used at the PSP location and does not have the corresponding profile of such printer. In addition, the designer may not know the finishing, packaging, shipping capabilities available at the PSP. This forces the PSP to perform prepress steps after it receives the print job from the designer in order for the print job to be printed, finished, packed and shipped using specific equipment.
Furthermore, the print job received from the designer can and often does contain errors. Such errors include missing fonts, missing images, incorrect image resolutions, missing crop marks, incorrect scaling, incorrect rotation, and incorrect color space. Such errors need to be corrected at the PSP before the print job can be submitted for printing. Another drawback of the lack of integration between the designer and the PSP is poor communication between the parties. This results in a relatively slow proofing and approval cycle between the designer and PSP.
After a job arrives at a PSP a customer service representative generates an estimation of costs and creates a job ticket. This ticket is then attached to the job, either electronically or physically, and remains with the job as it travels through the printing and production process. Often there is no tracking of the job. The job ticket itself contains top level information regarding the job for each stage of the printing process. This allows the various people completing the tasks to see the relevant information regarding the job such as the due date, the type of finishing, what the job is, the number of copies, the colors, etc. As the project goes through the process at the PSP, the people completing the tasks write on the job ticket or indicate on the electronic job ticket to show completion of various tasks. Should someone make a mistake in this process of updating the job ticket or forget to indicate that a task was performed, it creates errors in the total costs charged to the customer and often, such errors result in a loss for the PSP.
“Prepress” is a term used in commercial printing to describe various steps which must be taken before a print job can be submitted to a press. These steps need to be performed to ensure that the print job will actually be printable; that is, will result in a successful and accurate output. The electronic print job is submitted to a preflight program that automatically checks for potential errors such as those errors discussed above. Some of these errors may be critical and have to be fixed manually. For example, the PSP must call the designer in order to obtain a missing font or to get a missing image. This process takes both time and effort and thus cost the PSP money. More than 80% of the files submitted to the PSP have problems that require rework, often requiring contacting the designer. In view of the typically low profit margin in such a print shop, such effort expended at the prepress stage must be minimized.
Another prepress step is “imposition.” This is a term used in commercial printing to represent the efficient arrangement and spacing of a print job in order to use materials more efficiently. Yet another prepress step is color management. This involves adjusting colors selected by the designer for use with a particular press. For example, grass that may appear green to the designer on the designer monitor may need to be adjusted for the final output to have the same shade of green.
Often, performing the prepress steps for a print job can take hours or even days, especially when the customer or designer must be contacted. After the prepress steps have been completed, a hard copy proof is prepared and sent to the customer or designer for approval or modification before it is printed.
In addition to prepress steps which must be taken by the PSP, there are certain postpress or back end steps which must be preformed and which are labor intensive under the current workflows. One of these back end steps is “finishing.” Finishing is a term used in commercial printing to refer to the treatment of the printed pages such as folding, trimming, cutting or laminating. Creating a booklet out of printed pages is an example of finishing. Under the current workflows, a mock-up of the finished product, which is prepared before the main print job was printed, is submitted to the person performing the finishing of the final product. This allows this person to finish the product in the manner desired by the designer.
Another back-end task is called “packaging.” Packaging refers to the organization and preparation of the finished output in a cost-effective manner so that it may be shipped to the appropriate parties. For some print jobs, sets of the printed output are sent to different parties and must be packaged separately. In the printing of multiple business cards for multiple people for example, the printed cards are organized on sheets such that when they are cut, they do not need to be collated; rather, they are already separated and can be packaged with a minimum amount of effort.
Another back-end task is “shipping.” This involves knowledge and decisions on the package size, the type of delivery, costs, etc. The shipping process often involves much labor and paperwork, especially if the print job involves sending the same or similar items to multiple locations. Another back-end task is called job closing. This can include archiving files so that if the designer at a future date needs more of a certain print job all of the effort spent in the prepress and back end stages in configuring the print job will not have been wasted. Often a print job is over-printed in anticipation that the customer designer will want more. Another aspect of job closing is using the job ticket, which presumably has been correctly updated through each of the printing departments, to arrive at a final cost for a job. As mentioned above, since the print job is not being electronically tracked and since the updating of the job ticket is often done manually many details are often lost and the final cost of the job is under-calculated.